Real death

Check out the following song titles: “Obsessed with Morbidity,” “Matter of Decay,” and—last but not least—“Phallic Torment.” These are all songs by the Reno band Coffin Raid. If those titles disgust or disturb you, you might want to steer well clear of Coffin Raid, because the music will likely horrify you.

Coffin Raid is the musical equivalent of a really well done slasher movie. The band’s goal is to take a well-established genre—death metal—and perfectly execute it. (Pun 100 percent intended.)

It’s all here: heavy guitar riffs, growling vocals, squealing guitar solos, blast-beat drums, and gory, horror movie-inspired lyrics.

“They’re morbid and gross,” said vocalist and guitarist Räde Hendrix.

Coffin Raid started as a side project during Hendrix’s previous band, Thünderhead, sort of a Motörhead-plays-thrash rock ‘n’ roll band. He had written a few songs that didn’t fit with that band and decided to work on them with his brother, drummer Wölfgang Hendrix. The brothers had never played together, but they had natural musical chemistry.

Eventually, Räde recruited his Thünderhead bandmates guitarist Joe Küster and bassist Alex Gärcia to round out the project. (If the ubiquity of umlauts strikes you as too suspicious to be coincidental, then you’re right. Likewise, the band’s insistence that it’s just a coincidence that the vocalist is a heavy smoker named Räde seems a bit suspect.)

All four members are veterans of the local metal scene. Wölfgang also still plays in the experimental metal band Impurities, and Gärcia recently started playing with the moody post-punk band Plastic Caves.

Coffin Raid’s intense music is cathartic to hear, and probably even more so to play.

“It’s a great outlet, because I’m pretty frustrated and pissed off a lot of the time, and it’s a nice way to release aggression,” Räde said. But, he’s also quick to add: “We don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

Coffin Raid aims to fill a gap in the local market. “There were no death metal bands in Reno,” Räde said.

“It’s a dying breed of people who like to play it and actually do it right—not like coming in with clean vocals over the funk parts and shit,” Gärcia said. “Just keep it pure. I love that music. That’s what I grew up with—early Sepultura, Cannibal Corpse, all that stuff.”

The band members know the history of their subgenre and love to discuss it in great detail—tracing the history of the genre through its commercial peak in the late ‘80s.

Gärcia: “Entombed and all those guys were on MTV and started getting real money, and all those labels really tried to pump money into that music, and it just wasn’t popping off, and then the ‘90s came and completely disregarded it.”

Küster: “In the mainstream, anyway. In the underground, it was still going—all the good death metal.”

Gärcia: “The whole timeline of death metal is pretty funny to watch, but it is cool now. It’s an exciting time for it.”

Wölfgang: “Death metal renaissance?”

Räde: “I’d go to that fair!”

As DJ Shreddy Van Halen, Räde Hendrix plays records around town and hosts a weekly metal-themed radio show, the Witching Hour, on KWNK Sundays at midnight. He’s the type of guy who, long after a newspaper interview might seem like it’s over, will excitedly exclaim: “Maybe at the end of the thing, last quote, will you put, ‘Only death is real’?” Ω